The sound of metal legs skidding across linoleum refocused her attention. It was followed by a piercing yowl. Karen turned toward the commotion and found Ruby’s best-friend-of-the-moment, Maeve, cupping her face and wailing. Two feet away, Jayyden, a boy who had been in Ruby’s class two years in a row, stood motionless, his arms crossed and his lower lip and jaw extended. Within seconds, it became clear that there was blood rushing out of Maeve’s nose. Miss Tammy, who had no doubt honed her emergency management skills leading a dogsled team across the frozen tundra of Boundary Waters, Minnesota, rushed to the scene. After expertly wrangling the girl into a chair and instructing her to tilt her head back, she turned to the parents and began issuing rapid-fire instructions: “Someone grab me a paper towel,” “Call the school nurse,” “Call the principal,” “Have the main office contact Maeve’s parents.”
Wanting to be useful and feeling vaguely proprietary of Maeve, Karen offered herself up for the last task. But another parent had beat her to it. So Karen found herself standing helplessly with the others in a circle that had formed around the child and her immediate caretakers. This group soon included the school nurse, a squat-legged woman of indeterminate age, who quickly succeeded in stanching the blood flow.
Only then did Miss Tammy turn to the culprit. “Jayyden,” she said. “Would you like to tell me what you had to do with this?”
It was several seconds before he spoke. “She told me my firehouse looked stupid,” he mumbled plaintively. “Like me.”
Tammy grimaced; cooperation and respect were her two big classroom themes. “That was not respectful of Maeve to say,” she said. “But it also does not give you the right to punch her!” At that very moment, Karen could have sworn she heard Maeve ramp up the sniveling. “You’re in seriously big trouble now, buddy,” Miss Tammy went on with a quick laugh, her head waggling.
“Oooooh” went the more vocal members of the class, intuiting that this could only mean one thing for Jayyden: a visit to the office of Betts’s longtime principal, Regina Chambers. An elegant African American woman in her midfifties, Principal Chambers had exceptionally good posture and a life-size cardboard cutout of President Obama next to her desk. Nearly everyone at the school was intimidated by her, Karen included, with the possible exception of a bunch of well-meaning Caucasian kindergarten mothers, new to the school and likely soon to depart it, who were constantly complaining about how the milk served in the cafeteria came from hormone-treated cows.
Of course, none of the same mothers would be caught dead letting little Henry or Tessa anywhere near the school lunch, instead packing aseptic eight-ounce cartons of organic vanilla milk in their children’s bento lunch boxes, next to BPA-free Tupperware filled with fresh berries. Indeed, the only children at Betts who partook of Taco Tuesdays and Fish Finger Fridays were the ones getting it for free. But that was another matter…
In response to Miss Tammy’s warning, Jayyden hung his head—so low that his chin was nearly touching his neck. All the better to hide his own tears, Karen suspected. As she stood watching the unfolding scene, her brain swirled with conflicting emotions. She couldn’t help but feel that, to a certain extent, Maeve deserved it. In that moment, Maeve may have been the victim. But Karen hadn’t forgotten how the child had come to her house for a playdate recently and peed in the bathroom trash can, or the time that Karen had taken her and Ruby out for overpriced whoopee pies at the “old-fashioned” bakeshop up the street, and Maeve had spit at the waitress.
Karen tried not to judge how other people raised their children, but in truth, she rarely missed an opportunity to do so. And in her opinion, Laura Collier and Evan Shaw, who co-owned a production company that specialized in TV and web commercials, were doing a fairly shitty job. They’d essentially farmed out the parenting to a rotating cast of Tibetan nannies who seemed to quit every three months because they were paid substandard wages yet were expected to do the grocery shopping and cook and clean as well as child-mind. Meanwhile, the amount of time Laura and Evan spent with Maeve and her younger brother seemed to be inversely proportional to the number of pictures they posted of them on Facebook and Instagram. They also ran an almost impossibly tight ship (from afar), insisting that their children wear sunscreen 365 days a year and abstain from all foods containing added sugar. Was it any wonder that, according to Ruby, Maeve hoarded Tootsie Rolls under her bed?
But then, was Karen any less neurotic or uptight than Laura about sun protection and sucrose?
And was it any surprise that Jayyden had hit Maeve? Poor, unloved Jayyden. From what Karen had heard around school, Jayyden’s mother was in prison. And he’d never met his father, if such an individual could even be identified. As a result, he was reputed to live with someone named Aunt Carla and various cousins in a public housing project, Fairview Gardens, on the edge of the neighborhood. The project consisted of half a dozen mid-rise 1960s-era brick buildings with small barred windows. If there was any flora or fauna to be found around its concrete courtyards, Karen hadn’t seen it. Friends in the neighborhood sometimes referred to the place ironically as the pro-jay—that is, as if it were fancy and French. (They called the big box store Target, Tar-jay, for the same reason.) Of course, it was just the opposite. That was the joke. Karen still hadn’t determined if it was offensive or funny.